Sit. Feast on Your Life.

Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

Monday morning and I've got a full belly and a full heart from a weekend complete with yoga bookends Friday after work and Yoga Niddra (The Sleep of the Yogi) practice on Sunday night. I spent time with several loves in my life - visiting date with R., my annual retreat with Sarah MK, phone time with Sara B., worshipping and praying at Liberation, trees and water, Volunteer Park lawn in the sun, unexpected slug sightings at St Edwards State Park, time alone with myself, silence, bookstores.

Sarah and I spend an overnight together during the year and we do kind of sit and feast on our lives - individually and communally. We don't spend all of our time together. This year we each spent some time looking at the balance (or the lack there of) between work, prayer, rest, and community in our lives and then sharing it with each other. I picked this up from Robert Benson at the 5-day Academy.

When we did this exercise briefly at the Academy I saw pretty clearly in lead and white that I was not committed to any kind of daily prayer practice and that I could use some more rest. And I have no one, but myself to blame for not getting more rest. Nothing and no one is getting in my way, but me.

This weekend I focused on what do I most deeply want and what do I need to do during this Year of the Slug and shedding the shell. Sarah noticed I didn't have a lot of action items on my list. Not a lot of adding and subtracting of activities, but no shortage of esoteric, la-la words, thoughts, ideas, longings.

I've got a little homework, but I was relieved later in the day that I already have an action item list going. I wrote one last month. I need to dig it out and add some things to it. Subtract some things too.

Thank you, Sarah.

R. and I spent Saturday afternoon at St. Edwards State Park. Beautiful, beautiful day and as we were walking along and I was talking about how I think, I feel I'm having an ongoing conversation with God lately, with the universe and what should I see on the path at that moment - a slug! A beautiful, little grey slug. And me beaming an Elf smile back at this little creature. Look how he/she just blends right in. Most of the slugs we saw were the color of licorice.

A week or so ago I woke up and looked at the ceiling and said out loud "God, I think you're showing me myself." Feels like a gift. I'm participating in a communication workshop right now so I'm having a hard time writing "feels like." I hear the teacher "That's an opinion, not a feeling. Here look at your feelings sheet with all the faces." I have 4 copies now. But, I'm claiming it. It does feel like a gift. I feel it in my chest and in the space around me right now. I was lying in yoga earlier that same week looking at the ceiling and I said "I'm trying, God." I heard back "stop trying so hard. Let it be." O.k.

Nice to have a break from wrestling with myself this weekend and do some feasting.

I pray you have a feast day or weekend on your calendar soon.

Love, Em